The vocabulary of search,
in plain English.
The terms that show up in every audit — defined short, clear and in our voice. No buzzword bingo, just what the words actually mean and why they matter to your ranking.
● 19 terms · free to access
Every term, individually look-up-able.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization — the work of building and writing pages so they get found in organic search. For us it is not a checklist but architecture: stack, information structure and schema are decided before design. A page ranks because of how it is built, not despite it.
SXO (Search Experience Optimization)
The half of search work that happens after the click. SXO maximises speed, stability and conversion so that earned visibility turns into revenue — not just traffic. Core Web Vitals and conversion rate are one discipline here, not an afterthought.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
The work of making your site citable by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. These systems do not rank pages — they cite sources. GEO structures clear answers, named entities, citable data points and the infrastructure (llms.txt, per-vendor robots.txt) that tells AI crawlers your site is ready.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
Shaping content so an answer engine can extract and cite it directly: clear answer up top, source-of-claim visible, FAQ and HowTo schema where it counts. AEO and GEO overlap heavily — AEO is the content-side piece, GEO the broader infrastructure and strategy frame.
AI Overviews
Google's AI-generated answer box at the top of the results. It summarises several sources and names them — often buyer intent resolves here before the user ever sees a blue link. Being in those citations is the new front page.
LLM citation
When a large language model names your page as a source in its answer. Unlike a ranking, a citation is binary — you are in or you are out. We track monthly, per engine, which queries cite you, with which snippet, and which competitors got there first.
Core Web Vitals
Google's set of three user-experience metrics — LCP, CLS and INP — that measure real load speed, visual stability and responsiveness. They are now a primary ranking signal, no longer a tiebreaker. Legacy stacks often cannot physically reach the thresholds; the architecture is the ceiling.
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
Measures how long the largest visible element — usually a hero image or the headline — takes to render. Under 2.5 seconds is considered good. Pre-rendered HTML served from the edge, with no database query at request time, gets LCP reliably into the green.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
Measures visual stability — how much elements jump around while the page loads. A high CLS means the user taps the wrong button because the layout shifts under their finger. Under 0.1 is considered good; you get there by reserving dimensions for images and embeds.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint)
Measures responsiveness — the delay between a user action (tap, click) and the page visibly responding. INP replaced the older FID metric in 2024. Under 200 milliseconds is considered good; heavy JavaScript layers are the most common killer here.
Schema.org / JSON-LD
Structured data that explicitly tells a machine what a page means — that this is a product, an FAQ, a local business. Schema.org is the vocabulary; JSON-LD is the format Google prefers to read it in. Clean, nested schema is what crawlers and AI systems read natively.
llms.txt
A spec-compliant text file at the root of your domain that gives AI crawlers a curated map of your most important content. Together with a per-vendor allowlist in robots.txt (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) it signals that your site is ready to ingest and welcome.
Programmatic SEO
Generating many similar pages from one template and real data — one template, N cities or service lines. Each page reads as bespoke local content because the data is real: opening hours, regional contact, areas served. This is the work legacy agencies cap at one location per quarter.
Hub-and-spoke
A content model where one broad hub page surveys a topic and several spoke pages each go deep on one facet — all linked to each other. It concentrates internal linking and search intent cleanly and is the backbone of topical authority. Every post we write is scoped against exactly this map.
Local pack / LocalBusiness
The local pack is the map block of three local results at the top of a location-based search. LocalBusiness is the Schema.org markup — with opening hours, areas served and coordinates — that Google reads natively for exactly those packs and for local AI answers. Set up cleanly per location, tracked in the live dashboard.
hreflang
An HTML attribute that tells search engines which language and country version of a page to show which audience. Set correctly, it stops your German and English pages competing against each other as duplicates. This site uses hreflang to pair DE and EN cleanly.
Canonical
A link tag that names the preferred version of a page when the same or very similar content is reachable under several URLs. It concentrates search equity on one URL instead of spreading it across duplicates. On migrations, a clean canonical strategy decides whether rankings carry over.
Lighthouse
Google's open-source tool that audits a page for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO and gives a score from 0 to 100. It is a useful lab number but no substitute for field data from real users — we measure both, and only publish what we can reproduce.
Saw a term in an audit that is not here?
The free Performance-Audit translates your site into exactly these terms — and shows where you stand today.